La mort en ce jardin / Death in the Garden (Luis Bunuel, 1956)Adam & Josh's takes (starts at 1:08:28)Well, after listening to that I'm a bit worried that Bunuel is simply not for me. Aside from his visual inventiveness, which there are some flashes of here (the ant-filled snake being the most notable one), he just doesn't connect with me.
This is the second film in a row which is ostensibly an adventure... but Bunuel seems so disinterested in depicting that in an exciting or entertaining way that I wonder why he bothers at all. I fail to see anything of value in the first half : theoretically I suppose the characters that are going to be stuck with each other in the jungle are being developed and set-up but Bunuel is as uninterested in characters as he is in traditional storytelling. Or maybe he's just bad at it, I don't know, but all of these "characters" aren't recognizably human, they're just there to symbolise different aspects of human society : the hypocritical priest, the heartless and greedy prostitute, the violent outlaw, the persecuted honest worker and his innocent mute daughter... that all
sounds like an interesting group, but if you read that sentence you'd know as much about the characters as if you'd watched the film.
One key point that might explain why I reacted so differently to this than Adam & Josh is the acting. I think it's pretty uniformly terrible, especially Simone Signoret who's just doing a bad Arletty impression throughout. I'm probably "wrong", because those are relatively big names (Signoret and Piccoli). Maybe it's the awful dubbing, but I've enjoyed Italian films that had even worse dubbing than this, so I don't think so. Maybe it's the fact that this is presumably Mexico and everyone speaks French, but given the circumstances I don't ever mind that much, Bunuel is clearly not after any kind of realism here.
Then the film's value must be in its allegory, right ? I guess... it starts with a revolt against an authoritarian state, but beyond that it's so vague... Francoist Spain comes to mind because it's Bunuel, but it feels very surface-level. I can see the ways in which the story and characters have a connection to that, but I don't see anything actually interesting or thoughtful about it. It's just kinda there.
Part of me feels like those two movies are just cash-grabs, with their ostensibly action/adventure-y hooks, that Bunuel absent-mindedly filled with his usual themes without really exerting himself.
3/10